5 ms·
libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
- wxw 2mo agohttps://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html https://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html > The Open Source Sabbatical is intended to provide professionally qualified software developers with the opportunity to work on an open source project for a limited period of time in order to improve it. > This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers. So cool. Congrats to Sebastian!
- ayanb 2mo agoThanks for highlighting. I just realized this is open to developers who aren't city employees, which is unique. A city can pay a vendor for a deliverable, but paying an outside individual to improve something the city doesn't own is interesting (to say the least)
- vasco 2mo agoSmells of favoritism and corruption and lack of priorities is what it does. This guy must know someone. I doubt that of everything the city of Munich depends on, an xml parser even registers as a thing that needs money. And if it did then you'd have to have given similar to so much more things already.
- what-is-water 2mo agoThe 6 month open source sabbatical is something any external developers can apply to (with a specific Open Source project and an Idea what to do), and the city selects among the candidates. They do explain why they picked libexpat[1] (google translate works well enough for the site). 1: https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#open-source-sabbatical https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#ope...
- account42 2mo agoAgreed, they should hire an army of consultants to select a proprietary software replacement that the city will pay for but not own, having to pay ongoing license fees for ongoing use. Much more efficient ant fair that way.
- rob74 2mo agoLibreOffice uses libexpat (https://libexpat.github.io/doc/users/ https://libexpat.github.io/doc/users/), and one of the major issues with using OSS in public administration is that there is still no open source office suite that can compete with M$ Office...
- weinzierl 2mo agoThe longer background is that Christian Ude our mayor until 2014 furthered the LiMux[1] project - migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux. He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk. Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft's siren song abolished LiMux and Microsoft got a nice campus in the city (they used to be at the outskirts). Since May this year we have the young and energetic Dominik Krause and there is hope for change again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/ https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
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- OtomotO 2mo agoLiMux was such a hopeful project. Let's see whether times truly have changed with the reckless US administration and the total dependence on closed source US software. Maybe Europe will finally truly wake up.
- pjmlp 2mo agoThe biggest problem is that none of these projects actually go for the full stack, hardware, operating systems, programming languages, user software, cloud infra. It is mostly a specific kind, and lasts one ruling period in most cases. On my German city, the library used a SuSE based distro for the computers, eventually it got back into Windows, when they switched IT support company.
- dataflow 2mo agoBy "balk" did you instead mean "budge"? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
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- righthand 2mo agoHey maybe the haters at Google /WHATWG can use this library instead of killing off XSLT. Just kidding we all know they’re too compromised by monopoly/advertising interests of Google and their own beliefs to allow such a cool technology to live on; and don’t have the skills for such a thing.
- neuronexmachina 2mo agoChrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.
- righthand 2mo agoI believe Chrome uses libxml2 (though perhaps they use libexpat too) and the WHATWG has claimed that XSLT should not exist as a part of the HTML spec (it should and does), so the WHATWG Google members can force Javascript rendering on everyone and secure their advertising monopoly (which is loaded through js). Their claim is that libxml2 is too security riddled and they can’t contribute any work to it even though they have plenty of people and money to help fix it and they just wrote a post claiming that LLMs has helped reduce the amount of bugs in Chrome. The jerks even used LLMs to generate an untested polyfill in Javascript so that they can reduce the absolutely stellar performance of XML rendering to slow Javascript. They also used the untested pollyfill as a reason to remove it. These are people who supposedly like the diverse web and performant technologies.
- coldpie 2mo agoI'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.
- righthand 2mo agoNo I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I don’t need to “find a better argument here” because the pathetic WHATWG cowards never did. They were divisive about it just to be divisive and impose their brain dead opinion on the world. So I am returning that logical approach to their “improvement” of the web.
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- kristianp 2mo agoRelated discussion of the maintainer stepping down from libxml2 support. libexpat is a different library of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196 10 months ago | 119 comments Also related: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- Axtrivc 2mo ago[dead]
- google234123 2mo ago[flagged]
- neuronexmachina 2mo agoCities shouldn't fund the software they rely on?
- google234123 2mo agoCities need a lot of things - should they fund everything?
- mindwok 2mo agoWhether they should or shouldn't is a worthy question that they have no influence over. Taking the initiative and supporting the software they rely on is a good step in the meantime while we argue on HN about whether it's optimal or not.
- jcelerier 2mo agoyes
- olyjohn 2mo agoNobody whines when they overpay millions to Microsoft for trash software. Fund one tiny project and everybody loses their mind.
- tyromaniac 2mo agoYes, because if they need them, they won't function without them
- quakeguy 2mo agoYes.
- HDBaseT 2mo agoWould you consider a city buying a Microsoft Office E3 license (Copilot 365 or whatever the fuck its called) for their staff an efficient use of taxes?
- andsoitis 2mo agoWhat’s happens after 6 months?
- aghilmort 2mo agothis is great! xmlppm was big part of xml study which did years ago and which uses expat for parsing xml; was first fond memory of expat / keep up great work
- Ericson2314 2mo ago> PS: If anyone managed to combine Clang-based MinGW with AddressSanitizer and Wine without crashing at launch, please show me how and drop me an e-mail. Thank you! It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem
- aktau 2mo agoI'm curious. Do you have more information?
- Ericson2314 1mo agoSure. Nixpkgs cross support for Windows has been in there a while. Native windows support for Nix is a bit less advertised because it is pre-release/pre-MVP-on-master, but see https://github.com/nix-windows/nix-windows-demo https://github.com/nix-windows/nix-windows-demo . And expect to hear more on this in the next few weeks :).
- warpech 2mo ago> The City of Munich follows the principle of Public Money, Public Code: Whenever possible, software developed in-house should be released as open source. The goal is not only to ensure the city’s own IT security but also to enable others to reuse the software securely, transparently, and in a traceable way.[1] [1] https://opensource.muenchen.de/security.html https://opensource.muenchen.de/security.html
- qalmakka 2mo agoOne thing XML is very good for is semantic documents adhering to a well defined schema - and it's one of the few commonly used text-based data storage formats that do it well (with XSD, DTDs are pretty terrible). Unfortunately the only library that currently implements validation is libxml2 - expat is way nicer, but it never supported it. I don't understand why most XML libraries do not implement validation - XML sucks as a plain data storage format anyway.
- pjmlp 2mo agoI had a good experience with DITA based tools when writing technical documentation a few years ago, and there are enough graphical tools for a Word like experience.
- shevy-java 2mo agoThat's good. Every country should do something similar.
- Telaneo 2mo agoLove it! More please!